How to catch an earworm

Many mornings I wake with a song on my mind. Not a bad way for this non-morning person to start the day. Going through the routine of getting ready for work, the song hangs on. If it lasts beyond breakfast, I declare it an earworm and decide its demise. This morning the song was a snippet of a hymn we sang Sunday morning when we visited a Baptist church. It was a hymn I had learned in middle school when we attended Walnut Street Baptist church. So it was familiar and singing it stirred the memory. It had a catchy melody. One that can easily get stuck. I guess it’s not bad to have an inspirational song rattling around in your head. The problem is that all I could remember was the chorus, so those two lines kept running over, and over, and over in my head. By the time I got in the car, the song went from inspirational to flat out annoying.

There are two cures for earworms that I’ve been successful with. First, listen to the song and sing along. That gets the melody and the words through your cognitive path it’s stuck on and out your mouth. Ok, so there is probably a fancy scientific reason this works, but in layman’s terms…just sing it!

The other cure is to listen to some other music. You don’t have to sing along, but it seems that just getting another tune going spooks the earworm and it crawls away.

To save my office neighbors an uninvited concert this morning, I’ve tapped into the second cure. Along with sharing this with you, it seems to be working.